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The Boys of Bummer

Darryl Strawberry with the Gulf Coast Yankees in 1995 and Ron Darling in Game 4 of the 1986 World Series at Fenway Park.Credit
Peter Cosgrove/Associated Press (left); Elise Amendola, via Associated Press

Ron Darling, the former pitcher for the great Mets teams of the 1980s (and later for the Montreal Expos and the Oakland A’s, but who cares?), has written a thoughtful and lively new book about the art, craft and business of his trade. It’s a nuts-and-bolts kind of baseball book — a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, “The Science of Hitting,” to cite the hopeful comparison made on the book’s jacket — but it is also, in part, a memoir. A workplace memoir. It tells us not only how Darling pitched, but what being a baseball player felt like to him, and what the game meant to him. That relationship was, of course, a bittersweet one; the game ultimately left him, as it does all players. And so he opens his book with an epigraph from A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball and former president of Yale (Darling’s alma mater):

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

I liked Darling’s book a lot, and Major League Baseball would surely have been better off if Giamatti, a strong and wise commissioner, hadn’t died of a heart attack in 1989 after only five months in office, but this quotation really annoyed me. For one thing, the manly but melancholy, elegiac view of baseball — the unforgiving verities of its geometry, the fleeting beauty of its playing, blah blah blah — is one of our hoariest sports clichés, the default setting whenever anyone who read Hemingway or Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy in college sits down to write about the game. But more to the point, baseball doesn’t just break your heart in poignant, circle-of-life, seasons-of-love, sunrise-­sunset, where-have-you-gone-Joe-DiMaggio ways. It also, and more frequently, breaks your heart in crass, grubby, depressing ways. As when the star third baseman of your 10-year-old son’s favorite team grudgingly confesses to having used steroids. Or when your own favorite team knocks down its stadium and puts up a pretty taxpayer-supported park named for a taxpayer-financed bank and with 15,000 fewer seats than the old pile, so that when you try to buy tickets to individual games for your family, the only seats available to the general public start at $270 a pop. True, you can find cheaper seats for resale on StubHub, but why, in depression or boom, does such a thing as a $270 baseball ticket even exist? Too often, the taste baseball leaves behind is less bitter­sweet than just plain bitter.

Am I speaking for myself? As a Mets fan, I suspect not. Indeed, while bitterness is itself a baseball tradition of ­Cracker Jack-like venerability (as fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants are well aware), over the past two dec­ades Mets fans have had a singular purchase on the emotion, beginning in the immediate wake of the 1986 World Series championship. That cocky, glorious team should have gone on to dominate the rest of the decade but instead squandered its promise in a sinkhole of clubhouse friction, management blunders and — no small contributor — epic substance abuse. Somehow, by the early ’90s, what had been the most colorful team in baseball became the sourest. (Remember Vince Coleman, of the 1993 Mets, throwing a firecracker at a group of fans and injuring three, including a toddler?) What does the franchise have to show for the present decade? A humiliation by the Yankees in the 2000 World Series, a near miss in the 2006 N.L.C.S. against the Cardinals and, back to back, two of history’s most funk-filled and enervating collapses.

The boys of bummer: you wouldn’t think this would be the basis for a powerful literary tradition (or $270 seats). But the ’86 Mets still exert a hold on the collective baseball memory, and Darling is not the only former member of that clubhouse manning the book-signing tables. Darryl Strawberry, the power-hitting right fielder of great talent and great flaws — an emblematic Met — has a new memoir out. Both books take their places on a shelf next to such fondly recalled Metsiana as Lenny Dykstra’s “Nails,” Dwight Gooden’s “Heat,” Davey Johnson’s “Bats” and Strawberry’s previous “Darryl,” a muddled, ­angry, sometimes nasty autobiography that made headlines in 1992 for its suggestion that Gooden may have been using cocaine during the 1986 postseason — as opposed to the subsequent spring, when Gooden in fact tested positive for the drug.

Thankfully, perhaps, “Straw: Finding My Way” isn’t much of a baseball book. It’s a recovery memoir, detailing Strawberry’s journey to self-acceptance and Christian sobriety via multiple arrests, trips to rehab, marriages, divorces, cancers and ­bottomings-out that never quite were, with his Mets career, and subsequent stints with the Dodgers, Giants and championship Yankees of the ’90s, as background music, or maybe bait. Believe it or not — here’s an act of expiation — he devotes more space to his 1999 arrest for cocaine possession and prostitution solicitation than to the three World Series he appeared in, combined. But Strawberry (along with his co-author, John Strausbaugh) tends to skate through particulars off the field as well as on, not ignoring his foibles but never digging in too deeply, either as storyteller or as analysand. That said, “Straw” does have the virtue of sincerity and of seeming profoundly felt. Its narrator emerges as a real and complex man: humble in the face of his failures, palpably hungry for redemption, and yet still capable of myopia and self-righteousness. You feel for him in a way you never did — at least I never did — when you were merely cheering and/or booing him at Shea.

Darling’s book, written with Daniel Paisner, should enjoy a wider readership and a longer shelf life. The former pitcher, an affable, frank and witty guide (though not a gossip), devotes each of his 10 central chapters to picking apart specific innings of specific games he either played in or, in two cases, observed as a sports­caster with the Mets (his current occupation). There’s plenty of lefty-righty ballpark wonkery, but “The Complete Game” also illuminates baseball’s workaday psychological grind. A nice example:

“When a good hitter leads off, he does something as soon as he makes an out, or gets a hit, or scores a run in the first inning and goes back to the bench: he gives everyone the scouting report. . . . This guy’s meat. The mood of that bench can tilt, just on the basis of one of these tossed-off comments. Guys who might have been tentative about their at-bats can all of a sudden become confident. That batter will never come back to the bench and say, He’s unhittable. But there are certain catch­phrases you’ll hear. Sneaky: that usually means the pitcher has a good fastball. Tough: self-explanatory. . . . As a pitcher, you start to think about it as if you’re launching a marketing campaign for a new product: your stuff. You want it to announce itself and create a certain first impression. You want to engender just the right buzz in that opposing dugout to ensure that no hitter gets too ­comfortable.”

Darling has a sense of humor about the game’s ups and downs. Befitting his Ivy League education, he also sees its elegiac potential. Echoing Giamatti, he concludes: “It’s a good life, a baseball life. It’s rich and rewarding and endlessly fascinating. And then, before you know it, it’s gone.” To which I say: I hear you, Ron! Let me know how that three-figure view looks from Citi Field.

THE COMPLETE GAME

Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound

By Ron Darling with Daniel Paisner

272 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95

STRAW

Finding My Way

By Darryl Strawberry with John Strausbaugh

Illustrated. 240 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99

Bruce Handy, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is a writer and deputy editor at Vanity Fair.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Boys of Bummer. Today's Paper|Subscribe